


Sharp And Unnecessary Perils

by depressaria



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Apocalypse, Community: tic_tac_woe, Demon Deals, Demons, Do-Over, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-29 09:42:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10851387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/depressaria/pseuds/depressaria
Summary: “I wonder what he’d say if he knew. It’d be one thing to sell your soul just to bring him back; all of you humans go nuts for that noble, self-sacrificing crap. But dooming your planet to bring him back, then checking out right when it all goes to shit, leaving him alone in the crapsack world you created? Kind of a dick move.”After the events of …And Then There Were None, Bobby makes a deal. Crowley interprets his request loosely, and sends him back to the night he and Rufus first met.





	Sharp And Unnecessary Perils

**Author's Note:**

> For the “Human Error/Accidents” square on my tic_tac_woe bingo card. Title from The Monkey’s Paw.
> 
> Hints of Bobby/Crowley, past Bobby/Karen. Canon typical violence plus mentions of John Winchester’s A+ Parenting.

Bobby took a swig from the bottle of whiskey and put the finishing touch on the devil’s trap. It wasn’t his best work, but it’d hold, and it’d have to do. 

With that done, he went back to the summoning ritual, dropped a lit match on the ingredients, and said the incantation.

Crowley was standing within the devil’s trap when Bobby turned back around, pretending that he wasn’t determinedly not looking at Bobby, but rather just especially absorbed in cleaning his fingernails. 

“Crowley,” Bobby said. “You know why I called.” 

“Do I?” He frowned, then guessed, “Booty call?” 

“I buried a friend today. He needs to be alive. What’s it going to take?” 

Crowley considered it theatrically for a moment, then shrugged and suggested, “Roll in the hay?” Then, when Bobby actually started shucking his jacket, he added, “I was _joking._ ” 

“You’d better get serious real fast.” 

“Do Daphne and Velma know what you’re up to?” When Bobby didn’t respond, he sighed and said, “All right, I’ll indulge you. Assuming I’m willing to buy your soul after what you pulled last time, what exactly is it you’re asking me? Bog standard resurrection?” 

“I need to make it right.” 

“Sounds very specific and well thought out. Good choice. And I get…?”

“My soul. Collect whenever you want, as long as I get the chance to make sure he’s alive and well before you do.” 

He once again made a show of considering the exchange, and just when Bobby was considering telling him to fuck off and stop yanking him around, he said, “Well, seems fair. I’m game if you are.”

Bobby kicked away part of the devil’s trap and Crowley stepped forward, already pulling out his phone—probably to take a picture and post it to some kind of softcore demon porno site that specialized in deal makeouts—but Bobby made the first move, grabbing Crowley’s face in hands that would have been trembling if he hadn’t finished off half a bottle of whiskey in Rufus’s honor, crushing him to him and kissing him deeply. Crowley returned the kiss with ardent smugness, melting into the embrace as if it were a kiss of actual passion instead of a demonic handshake, fingers of his free hand raking possessively through Bobby’s hair even as his other hand raised up his phone for the money shot. 

He heard the sound of phone’s camera going off, and the world spun away. 

~*~*~*~

When the world shuddered to a stop, his back was pressed to a door that seemed about a minute away from rattling right off its hinges, muffled screams of rage coming from behind it. It took him a few minutes to recognize the voice, and when he did his stomach dropped just about into his knees. 

It was Karen. The bastard had stuck him in some kind of nightmare. Figured he’d feel the need to screw with him instead of just telling him outright that there wasn’t going to be a deal. It figured he’d get laughed out of court when the boys could pawn their souls back and forth about a dozen times each and still have every demon in Hell at their beck and call.

Karen, her voice worn so coarse and ragged that it was just barely recognizable as her own, was screaming for him to let her out.

The hunting knife was in his hand, his knuckles white from gripping it so hard, and the door finally gave way. He was knocked flat on his face by Karen who’d screamed her throat so raw that she was drooling blood, her eyes full black and alien, and for just a second he didn’t remember that he was about thirty years too old to be living this out for real. He was just a man whose suddenly rabid and inhumanly strong wife was about to tear his throat out with her teeth, and his hand seemed to move on its own and it wasn’t slowing her down so his arm kept moving and red was blossoming over her lacy white nightdress and—

—And everything froze, down to the blood dripping off his knife. Crowley was standing at the end of the hallway, watching the scene with an expression part smug, part condescending, and (so slightly he may have been imagining it) part pitying.

“It’s not a nightmare, lover,” he said. “This is what you asked for.” 

Hoping he sounded just gruff and not as shaken as he was, Bobby said, “I wanted to resurrect the guy, not go back in time to the worst night of my life.”

“Oh, was _that_ what you were getting at? Silly me.” 

“You can put me back, now. You’ve had your fun, and I have another reason to drink myself into an early grave. We both win.”

Crowley sighed heavily, and crouched down next to Karen’s still form. Her hate-filled eyes—nothing at all like the eyes he’d been looking into when he took his vows—seemed to track what was going on around her, despite the fact that Crowley had hit pause. 

“Once again, I find myself in the position of advocating on your behalf. You said you wanted to make it right, right? This is a second chance. You get to go back and do it all again. And because I’m feeling so charitable right now, I won’t even come to collect until….” He made a show of checking the watch he wasn’t wearing, then said, brightly, “2012. It’s a good deal, Bobby. Never let it be said I don’t take care of my girl.”

“You’re out of your damn mind if you think I don’t know there’s a catch, here. That’s twenty more years than most people get. What the hell are you playing at?” 

“Maybe the catch was the friends we made along the way,” Crowley said airily. “Or maybe I just think you’re a good kisser.” He popped out of existence. Dick. 

“God damn it, Crowley, put me back!” 

But it was quite clearly too late, because an instant later, time resumed, and Karen was at his throat again, kicking and clawing and trying to bite and sprinkling him with thick, hot blood from the wounds that should have dropped her, but that he knew wouldn’t have any effect at all on her until Rufus came to the rescue and exorcised the piece of shit who’d possessed her. 

He half thought that maybe this was just a sick joke after all, that Karen would kill him this time and then he’d wake up back where he was supposed to be, with Dean and Sam walking on eggshells and giving him overly concerned Bambi eyes, and with a half-empty bottle of whiskey waiting for him.

Then Karen collapsed, shrieking again, smoke billowing off of her as water splashed over the two of them. Blearily, he turned, and realized that Rufus had arrived, looking shockingly young, tossing aside a now-empty flask of holy water and already performing the exorcism. Knight in shining flannel.

He wanted to tell him to wait, that they could… balls, they could keep her in a devil’s trap or something, and wait for her injuries to heal before exorcising her, and then maybe things would be different. 

But the demon was already gone. And a few minutes later, Karen was gone, too. 

~*~*~*~

Rufus’s hands were as gentle as he remembered when they touched his shoulder. “Listen, I know it’s a shock, but we’ve got to clean all this up.” 

It wasn’t a shock. It was a lot of things, but not shocking. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to speak, which made Rufus crouch down next to him and put a hand on each shoulder like he could power-of-christ-compels him back to reality. 

“It wasn’t her, Singer,” he said. Weird to hear him call him that. “It was her body, but she wasn’t home. Something else was running the show.” 

“It was her at the end,” Bobby said. His voice came out bleak and pathetic. He didn’t add that he knew from experience that she _was_ home, just—just tied up in the basement. Aware of everything the demon was making her do and unable to do anything about it, then getting control back just long enough to die in the arms of someone who’d sworn never to hurt her. 

Rufus’s mouth thinned. “I know.” 

The first thing Bobby did different was lean forward towards Rufus. It was habitual, muscle memory from the years when they’d worked together and shared shitty motel beds together and huddled for warmth together. All that Starksy and Hutch, ‘I’d take a bullet for him but we’re just friends’ shit that they danced around for years before they actually kissed. He was just _tired_. Had been tired before the whole Crowley thing, and reliving one of the worst nights of his life wasn’t his idea of a pick-me-up.

The first thing that happened different was that Rufus, reacting on reflex rather than habit, held him. 

~*~*~*~

It was after everything had been cleaned up, when Bobby had locked himself in the bathroom to wash his face and organize his thoughts, that it hit him.

This was real. 

The face looking back at him from the mirror was his own, thirty years younger and thirty pounds lighter. The only difference between that face and the one in the few pictures he had of himself from this time period was that his eyes were different. Which was to be expected, he figured. Windows to the soul, and what have you, and he hadn’t lived an easy life even before he knew monsters were real, but the past thirty years post-Karen had really put his soul through the wringer. 

“How hard could it be?” he asked himself in the mirror, hopefully low enough that Rufus couldn’t hear. 

He could do this. It was a hell of a lot more of a chance than most people got. 

~*~*~*~

He couldn’t un-know everything he’d learned over the years, but he played dumb enough that Rufus just figured him for a _really_ fast learner. Which, to be fair, he was, just not necessarily quite so fast as he came across when he’d already done the learning thirty years before.

They seemed to get closer a lot faster, too, though Bobby wasn’t sure if that was really the case, or if he just noticed it more than he had the first time around. Neither of them were the type of send each other flowers or play footsie at the table; maybe he was just noticing the subtle signs more because he already knew the answer. 

Either way, he tried to appreciate it while he could, before… before. 

He felt dirty, sort of. Like he was cheating somehow. He tried to tell himself that he’d made a deal with a damn demon to get here, so he’d damn well better try to make the best of it—that it didn’t matter if he was cheating because he owed it to Rufus to give him the best life possible. 

On New Year’s 1983, he kissed Rufus at midnight and tried not to think about what was gonna happen to Mary Winchester later that year. He sent a letter to their house telling her not to go into the nursery, but he knew she was going to ignore it. And what would it change? Dean and Sam would grow up with both parents and maybe have a shot at a normal childhood, but that yellow-eyed bastard would still have given his blood to Sam, and they’d ultimately end up in the same boat as before, except with none of the skills they’d need to survive a world of monsters and loss. 

Rufus moved in with him that year, and together the two of them built the panic room in the basement. 

“I could kiss you,” Rufus said, when Bobby added angel repelling sigils on the walls of the panic room. “You take paranoia to a whole new level, you really do.”

“I learned from the best,” Bobby told him.

They did a little more than kiss there, in the panic room, and Bobby tried to forget the fact that, by Christmas, the Winchesters’ fate would be sealed. Nothing he could do about that. If he tried to overplay his hand, he’d just end up fucking things up more. Better to make small changes when possible, and to save the big decisions for when he knew what far reaching effects the change might have.

~*~*~*~

He met John in 1984, which was new. It was autumn, nearing the anniversary of Mary’s death, and compared to the family photos he’d had a few glimpses of, John looked like he’d aged about ten years instead of two. He was in the woods, trying to track a wendigo that Bobby and Rufus had been tracking for the past couple of weeks, and doing a piss-poor job of it. 

He told him as much, and this time, he didn’t have to offer to show him the ropes. 

~*~*~*~

While going after a shapeshifter, Rufus broke his leg. That one was new, and for the life of him Bobby couldn’t figure out what he’d done different that had caused it. None of them had made any mistakes or missed anything; it was just that a grate in the sewers had unexpectedly given way under his feet and he’s fallen just wrong. Butterfly effect bullshit, where taking a dump ten minutes earlier than he took it on his first whack at life could lead to New Yorkers being outnumbered by ghouls instead of rats, or Jo Harvelle starring in those stupid teenage vampire movies instead of the horror show that was a hunter’s life. Sometimes he thought that must have been something Crowley snuck in, knowing it’d piss him off, because sometimes the changes just seemed so random or inconvenient as to be manufactured. Except after a few solid years of this crap, he was pretty sure it was the real deal. Either Crowley liked to play the long con when it came to misery (not an unlikely possibility), or the guy had genuinely been trying to do him a favor.

What happened was that Rufus had to stay at home, and John, who’d left Dean and Sam—then barely six and two—in a motel room, transferred them into Rufus’s care. He’d left them in the motel against Bobby and Rufus’s wishes, but neither had said anything because if there was one thing you didn’t give a Winchester unsolicited advice about, it was family. Bobby knew from experience, and Rufus knew from observation. John’d get this look when they asked him where the kids were, part defiant and part murderous and mostly vaguely despairing. It was hard to argue with that look. 

But for once, he listened, if only because Bobby and Rufus framed it like it’d be safer for Rufus if the kids stayed with him, which Bobby figured let John agree with them without feeling like he was agreeing that he was a shitty dad. 

Winchesters were a pain in the ass in any timeline. 

Like Bobby, Rufus had never had kids. He had nieces he saw maybe every other year, and that had to be enough. Personal baggage aside, it just wasn’t fair to raise a kid into this life. Hunting monsters, doomed to either die young and violent, or live just old enough to see all your friends die violent and feel, on winter mornings, every ache where every monster slashed you good or knocked you into next Sunday. They’d all been pushed into the job by circumstance, and John was raising them so that there was no way for them to do anything except seek vengeance for their mom. 

Rufus was good with kids, though. When Bobby and John got back from the hunt, he’d taught Dean how to use the turntable and was watching as Dean happily browsed through Bobby’s collection of records. Sam was contentedly scribbling all over Rufus’s cast, and Bobby couldn’t bring himself to be annoyed that Rufus had given him a box of the expensive colored pencils Bobby used to sketch in his journal. 

“Congratulations,” Bobby said when he walked in and surveyed the scene. “You survived your first day of fatherhood.”

“Not funny,” Rufus said, smiling, just as John said the same thing grimly. 

Mostly what Sam had drawn on the cast was nonsense. He was two, after all. But on one small section, he’d drawn a pair of sickly yellow eyes—more like malformed circles than anything else, but there was no mistaking the intention—surrounded by gray scribbles. Bobby saw John’s eyes catch on that little detail, too. 

~*~*~*~

For awhile, everything seemed to have been going okay. His small manipulations had led to John leaving Dean and Sam with him and Rufus more often than he had before, which meant they spent less time moping in cheap motel rooms and more time actually being parented. 

Two years of playing catch and making home-cooked meals and falling asleep watching dumb shows on the TV while Dean and Sam bickered because Sam had braided Dean’s hair while Dean was napping. 

His own childhood had been shitty, but Dean’s was shitty in a whole different way. Knowing John was out there risking his life, knowing monsters were real, all from the time he was old enough to hold onto a knife. John was still hiding his job from Sam, but it was only a matter of time until he knew, and from there on out they were pretty much doomed to butt heads for the rest of… forever. It was hard to reconcile this version of Sam with the one he’d left behind in his original timeline. This Sam didn’t know how deeply he and his father would hurt each other, didn’t know he’d grow up to get addicted to demon blood and start the apocalypse, didn’t know he and his brother had been destined since birth to be Michael and Lucifer’s vessels. 

Well, he couldn’t do anything about the whole pre-destined shit, and he couldn’t un-make the deal Mary had made with Azazel, but if he had anything to say about it, the apocalypse was not going to happen, and if John wasn’t going to step up, Bobby and Rufus would just have to be good fathers on his behalf. 

He taught Dean some hunter stuff, like how to keep a journal that was concise and informative, and how to put up basic wards against common monsters, and what details to keep an eye out for when encountering anything you haven’t heard of, so when you look it up later you actually have useful information to work with. But that was just a concession to John’s requests that he have Dean practice using weapons. When Sam got a little too interested in what Dean was learning, Rufus would sweep him up and read him pretentious literature—not that Bobby was going to complain about a kid learning about The Odyssey, if it meant he wasn’t learning how to gather blood from a cadaver so he could soak his weapons in it and _maybe_ live it tell about fighting a vampire. 

It was a whole two years, actually, of everything going okay. Sometimes, when he was falling asleep with Rufus warm in his arms, he actually thought to himself that that slimeball Crowley had actually done it. 

Then the kids got sick. 

John had long since started hunting on his own, and this time he dropped the kids off at Bobby’s place before going off to look into some disappearances a few towns over. Both had colds when John dropped them off, but they got worse quick, and John wouldn’t answer his phone.

They had to take both of them to the emergency room, where the doctors administered IV antibiotics to the kids and a lecture to end all lectures to Rufus and Bobby about how they should have brought them in sooner—a humiliation rendered all the more intolerable by the fact that if it had really been up to them, those kids would be whisked off to a doctor every time they so much as scraped their knees. Babysitting on John’s leash was almost as restrictive as not babysitting at all. 

It felt fucking awful, frankly. 

Then it felt a whole lot worse when John got back from the hunt and just about lost his damn mind over it. Went on about how it wasn’t safe and they should have figured something out before it got this bad, every John Winchester tantrum tactic in the books. He ended up setting off the fire alarms and extracting the kids in the confusion, who were by then out of the woods. He seemed beyond words as he bundled them into the Impala, furious with Bobby and Rufus for letting it happen, furious with Dean and Sam for worrying him, furious with himself for being furious, furious with the demon, with Mary, with the world. 

All he could think was that they were never going to see those kids again.

He didn’t know if this was something that had happened in the original timeline, if his increased involvement in their lives had just meant that when they inevitably got really sick, John had someone to blame besides himself. It didn’t really matter, he supposed. He’d fucked up somewhere, and the kids were paying the price.

~*~*~*~

John stopped by a month later to tell them that Dean and Sam were all right. 

Rufus was out investigating a possible haunting, so it was just Bobby and John. And the boys, of course, but they’d been left in the Impala, which was parked just far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to hear the conversation that was about to ensue. 

“Doctors said it was pneumonia,” John said. Bobby had already known as much, but John had a particular bleak, disappointed quality to his voice when he wanted to, a tone that had a tendency to make Bobby feel momentarily like a chastised child, even though he had four years on the guy.

“Doing better, I’m guessing?”

“Yeah. They’ll be fine. Just thought you’d want to know. You earned that much.” 

Earned that much and no more, was the implication, which was complete and utter bullshit, and it made him so suddenly furious that if he couldn’t just barely see Dean’s face pressed against the rear window of the Impala, he’d knock John’s ungrateful lights out. 

Instead, Bobby said stonily, “We called you more than once. You didn’t pick up. We didn’t have a choice.” 

He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “There’s so much I have to do to make it right, for Mary, and it’s so… They’re my kids, Bobby.” 

“Maybe they shouldn’t be.” 

John’s eyes, normally so expressive, were dead in his pale, too-thin face. “They’re all I have left.” 

He went back to the Impala. Bobby let him, and, when he could no longer hear its engine, chopped firewood until his hands were blistered and he could think straight again. He didn’t call Rufus. Didn’t think he could and keep from spilling the beans about the deal with Crowley. 

Except that night, when he went to bed, all he could think about was that it was his fault. The John Winchester he’d known wasn’t like that, spiteful and codependent. Well, maybe he was, a little, but he fought that aspect of himself as hard as any grieving husband could, and he was never intentionally blasé about the kids’ safety. And the John he’d known would have never forbidden him from seeking medical attention for them in the event they got sick enough to need it. It was like some worst case scenario version of him—cold and isolationist to the extreme, not just finding it difficult to trust but rather finding it _impossible_ to trust, placing expectations on his children that were literally unattainable rather than simply unfair or difficult, hanging onto them like mementos of what he’d lost in the fire.

Poor kids.

Deals always went bad. He knew that, not just academically but from seeing John’s deal, and Dean’s deal, and his own goddamned deal that he only got out of for the literal grace of God—or just an angel, but close enough. And here he was dumb enough and selfish enough to go and do it again. 

All just because he couldn’t live with the guilt of Rufus dying. Well, he’d really stepped in it, because at the rate things were going, by the time Crowley came to collect, he’d have a lot more guilt to live with. 

~*~*~*~

While Rufus was still gone on the salt and burn, Bobby got all the supplies together for a summoning. 

He couldn’t go through with it. Told himself that at least everyone was alive still. No point reneging on a deal that… well, it had started to go pretty horribly wrong already, honestly, but things could be worse. He’d seen worse. He couldn’t justify throwing Rufus’s life—and his own sacrifice—into the garbage just because he’d fucked up once. There would still be chances to fix things, because there had to be. It had to be worth it. 

~*~*~*~

Jim Murphy sometimes called with updates, when John deigned to leave the boys in his care, but those occasions were few and far between, far fewer than they’d been originally, and only got rarer as the years wore on. 

It felt like losing his own kids. Which he’d done more than enough in his original timeline, with those two idiots sacrificing themselves for each other over and over again, but at least then it’d been their own choice and he’d gotten to see them grow up into people he was proud to have had a hand in raising. Now, he’d be lucky if either of them even remembered him. Or survived to adulthood.

Neither of them could do anything but kept busy. They did a lot of good, banished a lot of bad guys, but there was always that something missing.

Rufus sometimes gave him meaningful looks when a dumb movie on TV mentioned adoption, but it was a dumbass idea and they both knew it. They got two german shepherds who were supposed to sleep outside to guard the house, but ended up taking over first the couch and then the room the boys used to share. Bobby hadn’t seen hide nor hair of either of them in this timeline, so he named the dogs Pamela and Jody and didn’t feel too weird about it. The larger of the two dogs looked more like an Ellen than a Jody, but he’d actually met Ellen in this world, so he figured that actually would be a bit weird.

They found more demons than he remembered finding in the original timeline. 

It was mostly just the black-eyed ones, and when they saw those they exorcised them pretty quick, but once or twice he thought he saw some variety. It was in innocuous places, like while he was picking up an order of ammo he’d see one of the other patrons glancing at him with blank, unnatural yellow eyes. Or sometimes when he was conning his way into an office building, the workers would be chatting around the water cooler, none of them noticing that one of their coworkers had red eyes.

He never told Rufus about those. 

~*~*~*~

1993 came and went without incident. 

So did the millennium. The only difference was he never got an invitation to Sam’s graduation. 

It made him nervous. Deals always went bad.

~*~*~*~ 

The Dean and Sam he met later were just wrong. 

Both looked about fifteen years older and fifteen pounds lighter than they should. They dressed the same and stood the same, but their eyes had the same dull quality John’s had had the last time Bobby saw him. Dean had actual gray in his hair even though Bobby knew he wasn’t due to start graying for another few years, and Sam… Well, it seemed like some parts of the original timeline stayed the same, because Sam had quite clearly picked up the demon blood habit in this one, too. 

Sam sat at the kitchen table with his laptop and a pile of books from Bobby’s collection, Rufus was grocery shopping, and Dean was leaving to go get another pile of books from the trunk of the Impala. 

He waited until Dean was out of earshot, and then asked, flatly, “You’re on demon blood, aren’t you?”

“You’re paranoid,” Sam said, but his face was so carefully blank that Bobby knew he was right. 

“Listen, I know you don’t know me all that well and you think I don’t know shit about your life, but trust me when I say that this is not the answer. I don’t know what that Ruby chick told you, but—“ 

“Who the fuck is Ruby?” He wasn’t faking ignorance, then; he seemed to genuinely have no clue who Bobby was talking about.

That put a wrench in Bobby’s speech. “Well, maybe not Ruby, but there’s someone in your life, isn’t there? Telling you you have to drink that shit so you can kill Lilith and stop all this, right?” 

Dean walked in then, looking at the two of them warily. It didn’t feel good to know that in this timeline, Dean was just as ready to play peacekeeper at the drop of the hat. It was like seeing their family fall apart on instant replay. “You guys having a good talk?” 

“He’s lost it, Dean,” Sam said. “He’s talking about how I’m on demon blood because someone I’ve never met told me to.” 

They didn’t know him. Dean had only a few faded memories of staying with Bobby, and Sam’s memories of him would be even dimmer, if he still held onto them at all. It was too easy for them to accept the simplest explanation, which was that Bobby had gone nuts. He could feel his last bit of control over the conversation slipping away; Dean’s expression went from wary to pitying. Like he thought Bobby’d lost it from the isolation, the woe of John Winchester not deigning to grace Singer Salvage with his presence. 

“So what do you do with demon blood, anyways,” Dean said, trying for his best conflict-defusing smile, clearly not wanting to burn this particular bridge unless he absolutely had to. “Snort it, inject it?”

“You _drink it_ , idiot, and I haven’t lost it. I just…” Balls, he didn’t know what would happen if he told someone he was from an alternate timeline, and wasn’t sure he wanted to test it out on the bizarro versions of Dean and Sam. He figured it was best to be as vague as possible, and to leave out the parts about them being destined to be meatsuits for Michael and Lucifer. “I have my connections, all right? Something’s coming and it’s trying to trick your brother into helping it along. You’ve got to get him clean before it’s too late. Just look at him; he’s strung out on the shit.”

Dean looked doubtfully at Sam, who was sitting innocently at the kitchen table, looking admittedly relatively normal-for-this-timeline aside from being in need of a shower and a sandwich, giving Dean his best can-you-believe-this-asshole bitchface. “You’ve been talking to Gordon Walker, Bobby,” Dean said finally. 

He hadn’t, but he knew too much about their problems with him to totally fake ignorance. “Walker has a vendetta against you two. I just want to help you stop the apocalypse.”

Except both of them shut down at that. Dean’s normally easy and disarming smile became fixed, and Sam became exceptionally interested in a loose thread on his sleeve. 

Balls. It was too early, but a lot of things had happened too early in this timeline. He considered, with yet another pang of useless guilt, that maybe this was all because he’d accidentally hastened his falling-out with John. “You’re thinking about saying yes, aren’t you? Both of you.” 

“It was a bad idea, coming here,” Dean said. “I’m sorry for bothering you. Come on, Sam.” 

“Don’t go,” Bobby said, panic rising in his throat. Or maybe that was vomit. “We should talk about this. We can—“

“We’ve taken up enough of your time,” Dean said, ushering Sam out the door. With a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, he said, “It was good to see you, Bobby.” 

And then they were gone. 

Rufus came home an hour later, bearing a bag full of groceries that they’d planned to turn into a homecoming dinner for Dean and Sam. 

When Bobby got done telling him what had happened, Rufus looked about fifteen years older, too.

~*~*~*~

They both said yes. 

Bobby didn’t know which said yes first, or what happened once Michael and Lucifer burned away everything that had been Dean and Sam until all that was left were vessels, but the resulting fight leveled Kansas. 

Then the Croatoan virus outbreaks started.

~*~*~*~

The infected were mostly contained to the cities and suburbs, and hadn’t yet overrun the more rural areas. Bobby had seen his fair share of dumbass horror flicks. He knew the drill. 

They figured out pretty quick, though, that it was safer to travel alone, when they had to leave the house for supplies or information. 

Knowing that going with him would only put him in danger didn’t make it any easier to watch Rufus head off alone. 

Pam and Jody were still kicking, but they were too damn old to be effective guard dogs. Bobby related a bit too much to that to begrudge them feeling old and tired. They’d sometimes growl if someone or something was creeping around outside, but they were just as likely to keep on snoozing, occasionally kicking their paws as they dreamt of the youth they spent chasing rabbits, demons, and the occasional door-to-door salesman. 

So alone was alone. He felt bad letting Rufus go out into a world populated by scared civilians and glorified zombies, and he felt bad leaving Rufus alone in the house with only two elderly german shepherds to protect him.

He never did get any better at carrying the guilt. 

~*~*~*~

When Rufus was out on a supply run, Bobby gathered up the supplies for a summoning and arranged them in the library. He got halfway through drawing the devil’s trap and summoning sigils before he heard the scratching coming from the front of the house. 

When he peeked around the corner to try and see out the window without giving away his location, he saw that there was some guy wandering around the front porch, occasionally scraping at the door or rattling the doorknob. It was a good fucking thing they weren’t as lax as all the other people who lived so remote, who never bothered locking their doors because they didn’t think there was any danger of some maniac waltzing right into their house—like thieves were strictly a suburban thing. It wasn’t them you had to worry about, anyways. 

He took the infected out quick and quiet enough, but when he walked back inside his calm evaporated and he found himself in front of the liquor cabinet. 

The summoning seemed suddenly pointless. What exactly was he hoping to get out of it? Answers? It was always just cryptic statements and flirtatious overtures and snide insinuations, nothing useful unless he had leverage, and without a soul to barter he had none.

Rufus came in at the most humiliating moment possible, which was when Bobby was sitting in front of overturned altar, halfway to being well and truly plastered. 

“What’s with the body on the front porch?” He said it half cautious and half joking, going for light-heartedly comforting and winding up with none of the above. Bobby didn’t blame him. Coming home to a dead guy on the porch and blood everywhere, he’d be freaked out too. 

“Infected. Fuck if I know what it was doing all the way out here.” 

Rufus crossed the room to crouch next to Bobby. A frown creased his brow once he was close enough to see what exactly had been on the altar and recognize what the ingredients there were typically used for. “What’s going on here, exactly? I go out for a few hours and you summon a demon?”

It was too close to the truth. Eyes prickling, Bobby pressed himself to Rufus’s chest and said, into his shoulder, “I fucked it all up. I fucked up really fucking bad.”

“What did you fuck up?” Rufus asked, but he clearly wasn’t taking it seriously, just asking the requisite question to move along the conversation and get to the part where he reassured Bobby that he’d done everything right, he’d never done anything wrong in his life and was just a swell guy, really. 

His hands were warm on Bobby’s back, his heart beating steady and healthy in his chest, and it would be so easy to just go with it. Try to forget about the fact that this was all his fault, that if he hadn’t been weak enough to make a deal to get his ex back, if he had been strong enough to fight the khan worm thing to begin with, if he had been smart enough to predict how his actions would change the timeline, if he’d… He went wrong in so many places. He’d had regrets before, like anyone else, but getting the chance to go back and fix them had just given him twice as many. Starting with the fact that he’d asked for the do-over to begin with. 

He couldn’t say all that crap to Rufus. It wouldn’t be fair to him.

Instead he composed himself as best as he could, and fudged the hell out of the truth. “I’m just drunk,” he said, still into Rufus’s shoulder. “Thinking about all the shit I could have done different. Wondering if maybe I could have stopped it.”

“Not like you to be maudlin,” Rufus said, taking Bobby’s face in his hands. “Come on, Bobby. You tried your best to give those boys a childhood. We both tried our best. Not our fault John Winchester is a prick. And even if we’d been pulling the strings on that one, which we _weren’t_ , both of them are grown now. They knew right from wrong and they chose wrong.” 

“You’re a saint, Rufus,” Bobby said, and before Rufus could make some smartass comment and ruin the moment he kissed him, in the soft and all-encompassing way only two men who have known each other for decades can kiss. Knowing every quirk yet not being bored with it, craving the knowing, craving the assurance that he was alive and they were in love and it all meant something. 

Except when Rufus threaded his fingers through Bobby’s hair, Bobby felt something drip down the back of his neck. 

He pulled back and gently took Rufus’s hands in his own. The palms were bleeding from perfectly even holes. Almost—no, exactly like stigmata. 

Looked up to ask Rufus what the hell happened and Rufus’s eyes were full red, like a crossroads demon. They weren’t crazed or hate-filled like Karen’s had been. They were soft, compassionate. Loving. Rufus was looking out from them, they were just… flat red.

“No such thing as charity,” Rufus said gently.

He blinked and Rufus was gone and the walls were dripping with blood, so fresh that it seemed like the heat of it was warming up the room, great puddles of the stuff forming on the floor.

He grabbed the half-empty bottle of whiskey and took a long swig, eyes closed tight, and when he swallowed and opened his eyes the room was clean again. And empty. And quiet. Just him, on the floor next to the trashed altar, drunk as a skunk. 

Rufus showed up for real a half hour later, and the conversation played out exactly the same down to the kiss, minus the stigmata and eyes and vaguely ominous statement and Amityville walls.

He wondered if he was going nuts or the timeline was crumbling or Crowley was fucking with him or he was just so drunk it seemed like all of the above. Maybe the apocalypse messed with demon deals, shook too many demonic filing cabinets loose and left everything a little askew until some demonic secretary got around to re-organizing everything.

~*~*~*~

He dreamed he was standing on a crossroads in the dead of summer, no sound except for the wind. A woman—a crossroads demon—stood a few yards away, just far enough that he couldn’t see her red eyes. The wind was tossing her hair over her face and billowing the skirt of her black dress.

He took a step forward and the world melted into a diner, where he was sitting at a booth. A yellow-eyed waitress was pouring his coffee into his already-brimming mug, and everyone—from the patrons sitting at the bar to the cook in the kitchen the kitchen—was staring at him. Just silent. Hatred in their eyes like Karen’s. 

“You’re dripping, honey,” the waitress said. Something with bright headlights passed outside the diner and he saw that her eyes weren’t just yellow but reflective, like a shapeshifter’s. Like shining a flashlight on the woods at night and seeing the darkness light up with countless pairs of animal eyes.

“Maybe if you stopped pouring the damn coffee,” he growled, but she just kept staring with her unnatural eyes, revulsion in every line on her face, and when he blinked he saw that she wasn’t talking about the coffee but about the blood. There was a knife in his hand and he had it buried to the hilt in the waitress’s gut. The blood had soaked through her uniform and was pooling on the ground, forming grotesque swirling patterns where it mingled wth the spillage from the overflowing coffee cup, beginning to trickle underneath the table where it would soak through his shoes and—

—this time he was sitting in the driver’s seat of a car, Crowley in the passenger’s seat. Blood was steadily seeping through his shirt from an unseen wound in his chest.

He got the distinct sense he was responsible, somehow. 

“So did you make it right?” Crowley asked. There was a trickle of blood making its way from the corner of his mouth down his chin.

Bobby wanted to give a real answer, but his throat closed up the way it did in dreams sometimes—the way it did in the really nasty nightmares, where the horror becomes too much and you want to call for help but nothing comes out except a strangled rattle—and he leaned forward instead to kiss Crowley, half because in the haze of the dream it seemed the only thing he could do, and half because he thought, absurdly, that it’d make Crowley take it back. 

It was a perfectly serviceable kiss, despite the coppery taste of Crowley’s lips, until Bobby had to jerk back in shock and disgust because a torrent of syrupy blood came rushing out of Crowley’s mouth like vomit, soaking the front of his shirt. 

He woke up then, bedroom seeming quiet and somehow undersaturated, compared to the cheap fluorescent lighting of the diner and the bright, deep, shiny blood in the car. 

Rufus was sleeping deeply, having woken up just long enough to groggily tell Bobby to go back to sleep, so Bobby got out of bed as quiet as he could, went down to the library, and got out the materials for a summoning. He’d go through with it this time. 

The demon that appeared wasn’t Crowley, or any demon he recognized. It was a crossroads demon, not the one he’d seen in his dream, but still nothing remarkable. Just a pretty, thirty-something woman in a black dress, same as pretty much every crossroads demon he’d ever seen except Crowley. He’d have to bring that up the next time they talked. 

“You’re not Crowley,” he told her. 

She smiled sardonically. “Call forwarding is a beautiful thing. What can I do for you this fine evening?” 

“I actually just really wanted to talk to him.” 

Her smile didn’t so much as flicker. “He’s not available right now, sorry.” 

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why is he unavailable?”

“He retired last year.” 

“Retired.”

“Well. That’s the polite way of saying it.” 

The feeling of dread he’d been trying to hold at bay these past weeks slammed into him with a vengeance. “I don’t think you understand. I made a deal with him years ago and it’s gotten weird, and I just need to talk to him.” 

Her interest in the conversation seemed to be waning fast. She had hoisted herself onto the desk and was flipping absently through some of the books Rufus had left there, kicking the heels of her bare feet against the desk. “Your time’s almost up, isn’t it? Where you’re going, maybe you’ll have a chance to talk to him.” 

“Okay, there’s gotta be… Do you know what happens to a contract when the demon holding it retires?” 

“Whoever’s in charge inherits it.” 

“And who would be in charge now that he’s… unavailable?” 

“I think you know,” she said, her smile almost pitying. 

He froze when he heard, faintly, Rufus turn over in bed. The demon imitated him mockingly, her stolen eyes glittering maliciously even as she stretched them wide in a parody of anxiety. 

“He doesn’t know, does he?” she asked. 

“Shut the hell up.” 

“I wonder what he’d say if he knew. It’d be one thing to sell your soul just to bring him back; all of you humans go nuts for that noble, self-sacrificing crap. But dooming your planet to bring him back, then checking out right when it all goes to shit, leaving him alone in the crapsack world you created? Kind of a dick move.” 

“If you know that much, you know what the deal was. Crowley was the one who set this all up. I didn’t ask for this.”

“No, of course not. You were just as vague as humanly possible, so that when it inevitably backfired, you wouldn’t have to feel like it was all your fault. Crowley gave you exactly what you wanted, you just couldn’t admit it to yourself.” 

He could hear Rufus slowly getting out of bed. 

“Maybe I’m being too harsh,” she said thoughtfully. “You’re stupid, after all, not just selfish. Maybe this was just some plan of his that never came to fruition. He did seem to have an odd soft spot for you; he showed _everyone_ that picture of you and him getting to first base. Probably wrote Mrs. Crowley Singer in all his notebooks during meetings.” 

Rufus was coming down the stairs. 

She shot one last grin at him and said, “Guess you screwed him over, too.” 

By the time Rufus got down to the library, the demon was gone. 

~*~*~*~

Infected started roaming further from the cities. Bobby tried to take over full responsibility for the ones that got too close to the house, not wanting the guilt of putting that guilt on Rufus’s shoulders, but Rufus steadfastly refused. 

He said they were in it together. 

If he had any clue just how much of this was Bobby’s fault—

Sometimes, when he shot one, time would rewind. Their brains would get sucked back into their heads, the bullet would go back into his gun. Rufus never mentioned seeing anything similar, and he already walked on eggshells around Bobby, like he thought he was one bad argument away from going completely off the deep end. As if all of this hadn’t affected Rufus just as much. Losing the world. Losing the boys. Losing the boys _again_ , to something worse than a father simultaneously neglectful and overbearing.

Rufus suggested sleeping in shifts, to prevent getting snuck up on, but Bobby vetoed him. Even if they survived the apocalypse, Bobby only had three years before the hellhounds came for him, and he’d be damned if he was going to waste his last years of freedom sleeping alone. He’d had a lifetime of that in his original timeline.

He slept like a rock, most nights. When nightmares or odd noises woke him up in the night, he was instantly calmed by Rufus’s solid, warm presence beside him. He’d tell himself that it was worth it, for that, and sometimes he even believed it.

~*~*~*~

A little over a year into the apocalypse, Sam showed up on their doorstep. 

Not Lucifer wearing his face, but really him. Dead-eyed and ill-looking, but him. Bobby pulled every trick in the book—holy water in the beer, silver cutlery. He even replaced the tablecloth with one that had a devil’s trap painted on the underside, and nothing. He still kept a gun aimed on him.

“I can’t explain it,” Sam said, picking at the food they’d given him. “Michael and Lucifer were fighting, then something happened and I was in control again. I thought it was going to be for just a few minutes, but it’s been a week.”

“So, what,” Rufus asked. “He’s gone?” When Sam shook his head, he added, “What about Dean?” 

Bobby didn’t think it was possible, but Sam’s eyes went even deader. That was as good an answer as any, he supposed. 

“I need to talk to you alone,” he told Sam. 

“Bobby,” Rufus said. “Look at him.”

“No,” Sam said. “It’s okay.” 

“You shout if you need anything,” Rufus said as he left the kitchen. “Either of you.”

Bobby took Rufus’s vacated seat at the kitchen table and tried not to think about the fact that it might be one of the last time’s he’d feel his body heat. That was fucking depressing, feeling sad over not being able to steal a man’s butt heat anymore. He’d have to tell that one to the boys, if he ever got back to his original timeline. If not, he was sure Crowley would be laughing it up in hell. 

He decided to just come out and say it. “I made a deal with a demon. I wanted to bring someone back to life, but the bastard sent me back in time instead, told me a second chance was better than a resurrection. I fucked it all up. It wasn’t like this in my original timeline.” 

Sam’s jaw tightened. “You mean in your original timeline, I didn’t doom humanity by agreeing to be Lucifer’s meatsuit.”

“Don’t give yourself so much credit.” If only because Bobby would prefer to take all the credit for himself. “The guy I made the deal with didn’t do so hot in this timeline either. I talked to another demon who said he’d been fired. I thought I could talk to him, convince him to tear up the contract, but she said that when a crossroads demon gets fired, their contracts go to their boss. _The_ boss.” 

“So I’m supposed to somehow waltz into hell, hope they don’t notice Lucifer’s not home, dig through the millions of contracts they probably have, find yours, destroy it somehow, and hope that reverses the deal you made.”

“I could try and trap a demon to see if they have any intel about it, but I’d just as soon not give them a warning that you’re planning on going in there.”

“No, you’re probably right.” He went to take a sip of his coffee, which was probably ice cold by now, then frowned and said, “you’re dripping.”

Bobby froze. For a minute, the coffee in Sam’s mug looked like blood, clotted with chunks of viscera. 

Then he realized that he’d absently tipped over his own mug of coffee slightly, and a small trickle of lukewarm coffee was making its way down his arm and dripping gently off his elbow onto the floor. 

He was too old for this shit.

When he was done mopping the coffee off his arm, he said, “So when do you think you’ll be ready to go?”

“The sooner the better,” Sam said grimly. “I don’t know how long I’ll be in control.”

~*~*~*~

Sam stood in front of the Devil’s Gate, frown firmly in place. He’d succumbed to Bobby and Rufus’s requests that he get cleaned up and fed before heading over, but that just made him look worse, somehow. Even with clean hair and clothes, he looked plain worn-down, like a rusted old car left in a field that was slowly reclaiming it. 

“Any last words of wisdom?” he asked, only a little bitterly. 

There was a lot he wanted to say. If there was gonna be an exam after all this was over, he’d ace the thing, because all this taught him way too much about himself. He made the deal because he felt guilty about Rufus, but that just fucked everything up even worse. And what had happened to Rufus wasn’t even really his fault. He could argue for days that he’d made too many bad decisions that led to him getting infected with that thing, or that Rufus was only there because of him, but at the end of the day he wasn’t the one that drove in the knife. What was happening to the world now was all on him. And he’d have to live with that, even if he got everything back to normal. Because he’d _know_. Know that he was capable of doing something so stupid and awful and misguided, of ruining the world because his partner kicked the bucket and it made him feel a little sad. Boo fucking hoo. He figured Dean and Sam probably felt more than a little sad about their ruined childhood, and that all the people who’d had their lives torn about by the Croatoan virus felt more than a little sad about that. 

Finally, he just said, “Even if you pull this off, put everything back the way it’s supposed to be, I’m still going to have to live with it. I’m not going to forget what you did—any of it.” 

Sam gave him one of those tight non-smiles, looking momentarily like the real Sam, and slipped through the door. 

Rufus’s hand slipped into Bobby’s. Bobby held onto it as tight as he could, and tried to ignore the fact that he occasionally felt as though hot blood was dripping through their linked fingers from the stigmata (that were _not there_ no matter how many times he thought he saw them they weren’t there and absolutely were not real) on Rufus’s palms. 

~*~*~*~

They sat in the graveyard for some time, watching the closed devil’s gate. Wondering, as their asses went slowly numb against the frozen ground, and the wind whipped dead leaves around the graves, how exactly they’d know if Sam was successful or not. Presumably something would happen one way or the other—either everything would go back to the way it should be, or Lucifer would come at them with a vengeance.

After a couple of quiet hours, Rufus said, “So are you going to tell me the truth?” Before Bobby could open his mouth, he added, “Don’t try to deny it. You’ve been sitting on something big for a long time.”

Bobby chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment. “I fucked up, Rufus,” he said. 

“Yeah, you’ve told me that a few times now.” 

“I made a deal with a demon.”

“How much time did they give you?”

“What, you’re not gonna ask what I made it for?” 

“Does it matter? It all ends up the same, Bobby, you know that. People make deals for fame, fortune, health, to save a loved one… in the end it always goes bad and you end up in hell. All I need to know is how much longer I have with you.”

“What if I wished for something completely awful?”

“You didn’t. How much time?” 

Bobby sighed. “I have three more years till they come to collect.”

He’d expected to get yelled at, honestly. What he didn’t expect was for Rufus to pull him into a hug, so tight that he could hear joints from both of them creaking slightly in protest, then pull back just to press a kiss first to his forehead and then his mouth, warm and alive and…. His eyes were prickling and his nose was burning. Rufus’s eyes were suspiciously bright, as well, and he wanted to say something but his throat was all tight and he was worried about what would happen if he tried to talk. 

“It was me, wasn’t it?” Rufus asked. “Something happened to me and you made a deal to save me.” When Bobby didn’t respond, he added, “I thought so.” 

“I don’t regret it,” Bobby told him. “I know I should, but I don’t regret giving my soul for you.” It was the side effects he regretted. He’d do it again if he could guarantee nothing would be lost in the crossfire. 

“How would you feel if I’d done it for you?”

“I know.” 

“Eternal torment in exchange for me being here for a measly extra decade or so? It’s not worth it, Bobby.”

“I know.” 

He pulled Bobby into another hug, just as tight as the first, and said against his neck, “We’ll figure something out. Or if we don’t, we’ll make the most of it. Or I’ll figure out a way to get you out, I don’t know.” 

“It’s the goddamned apocalypse, Rufus. What are we gonna do, go fight zombies in Paris?” 

Rufus started to chuckle, but the sound got cut off in the middle, like someone had hit pause, and for a minute panic started to swell in Bobby’s stomach. Then he realized that the leaves were frozen too. 

He glanced towards the devil’s gate, but it was still firmly shut and there was no sign of Sam. 

He shut his eyes hard and turned back around, except when he did, Rufus was gone and Crowley was standing a few feet away, looking a little rumpled and careworn, his suit slightly torn and bloodied, but otherwise seeming none the worse for wear. 

“Well,” Crowley said, smiling coldly, “that was bracing. Was it good for you, too?” 

~*~*~*~

“The deal’s off,” Bobby told him. “I don’t care what it takes. You can have my soul anyways, I really don’t care anymore. Just put everything back the way it was before I made that stupid deal. I learned my lesson, all right?”

“What exactly makes you think this was intended to be a lesson for you? Have I somehow given you the impression that I care that deeply about your emotional development? I’m not in the business of holding humans’ hands while they have life altering experiences. You can only watch so many train wrecks before they lose their charm.” 

“Oh, come on. You can’t tell me you had no ulterior motive here.”

“Whatever plan you think I had here, it obviously didn’t include being stripped of my title and hung back on the rack like some bloody human fresh off the mortal plane. Would you like to know what Alastair—and yes, he’s still alive and well in the piece of garbage you made with your second chance—can do with a pair of pliers and fifteen minutes? You’ll have to ask someone else, because your complete and utter failure to make up for your numerous past failures has fucked the hierarchy up so much that my name is dirt now. I’m not even important enough to be tortured by the torture guy.” 

“Consider me suitably chastened,” Bobby said. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

When Bobby stepped forward to kiss him, Crowley stopped him with a hand to his chest. “Much as I know you love kissing the girls and making them cry, the deal’s already off. I do have precautions in place, in the event that these things leave my hands. The contract’s been degrading for awhile now, as you may have noticed; Joe Hardy just finished it off on his little mission of redemption there.” 

Bobby closed his eyes and counted to ten. It did nothing to stop the sudden anger rising in his chest, but at least he tried. “Then what the hell was the point of your temper tantrum just now?” 

Crowley’s sardonic smile was a shadow of its former self. “I had to hang around having the corneas peeled off my eyeballs for the past twenty years while you played grab ass with your old flame. The wet-behind-the-ears slag in charge of torturing me vomited the first time he got inside my chest cavity. You’ll forgive me for feeling a little petty.” 

“You’re unbelievable. Some of the responsibility for this train wreck is yours, too, you know. You didn’t have to go with the creative interpretation of what I asked you to do. You didn’t have to agree to deal with me at all. Yet you’re blaming me for your lack of foresight? What happened to being so superior to humanity?” 

“Maybe I was just hoping you’d get to second base this time.” 

Before he could even roll his eyes, the world blinked out of existence.

~*~*~*~

He woke up in a different graveyard, the one where they’d buried Rufus. 

Crowley was not nearly as funny as he thought he was.

His phone was in his pocket, and according to it, it was about an hour before he’d summoned Crowley and made the deal. There were a few missed calls from Dean and a text asking where he was and if he was okay. 

He sent a response before making his way to Rufus’s grave and sitting down heavily at the foot of it. It felt like he’d aged about thirty years. Not just in his head, but in his body, too. His joints still felt echoes of the aches of the life he’d just escaped, and the ones from this life felt new again. 

He could still feel Rufus’s mouth on his, still hear his strong and steady heartbeat, still smell the particular scent of his cologne mingled with clean flannel. 

There were no tears; he’d shed nearly two lifetimes’ worth of them, and had to save the ones he had left for whatever heartbreak Dean and Sam had planned for him in this one. But he sat at Rufus’s grave until the evening chorus of frogs and insects was replaced by morning birdsong, and the memories of his scent were replaced by the more familiar smells of dead leaves and grave dirt.


End file.
